The Real Reason Why No One Can Agree On The Color Of This Dress

This may spark World War III

Last night an image of a dress was posted on the social media site Tumblr. The user, who goes by the name "Swiked," shared the photo in desperation after she and her friends could not agree on the color. She begged other users to weigh in. The result? A worldwide argument.

The picture spread like wildfire across the Internet, dividing users all over the world into two frustrated and confused groups: those who saw the dress as black and blue, and those who saw it as gold and white. Obviously, there is no way that the lacey frock could be both things at once, so which is it? Theories have been flying around all night, some even saying that anyone who saw black and blue has something negative weighing on them. But Wired has stepped in with the real, scientific answer.

As it turns out, it's actually less about what your eyes are doing/seeing, and more about what your brain is processing. Light enters the eyes through the lens, then travels to the back of the eye and hits the retina. The pigments that are collected by the retina send signals to the visual cortex in the brain, where these signals get processed into an image. So how is it that everyone is seeing different colors? It's all about the light, and just how much of it is shining on, and bouncing off of, the object we are looking at.

It is our brain's job to decide what color light is bouncing off of the object, then subtract that color from the actual color of the thing itself. Wired spoke with Jay Neitz, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, who elaborated. "Our visual system is supposed to throw away information about the illuminant and extract information about the actual reflectance. But I've studied individual differences in color vision for 30 years, and this is one of the biggest individual differences I've ever seen." Neitz himself sees the white-and-gold version of the dress.

Typically, we aren't arguing about the color of objects everyday because for the most part, we all perceive the light in a similar way. But because this image is unusully lit between colors, it's proving just how differently people are wired. According to their report, Wired explains that humans have "evolved to see in the daylight," but that daylight changes color, ranging from the pink of dawn, to the blue of daytime, back down to the red of dusk. Bevil Conway, a neuroscientist who studies color and vision at Wellesley College, helped to clear up why this is so important: "What's happening here is your visual system is looking at this thing, and you're trying to discount the chromatic bias of the daylight axis. So people either discount the blue side, in which case they end up seeing white and gold, or discount the gold side, in which case they end up with blue and black."